Formosa termites had eaten through the outbuildings, the old slave quarters, and part of the house's walls and lower veranda, robbing them of any sense of historical severity they might have once contained, as though their edges had been molded by the gentle forces of time and foliage rather than parasitical insects. Raphael had finally relented and allowed chemical treatment of his property, but the accumulative effect of his organized neglect was a tangle of air vines, wild persimmons, palmettos, pecan trees, blooming flowers, and desiccated wood that no film company could replicate.
I stopped my pickup in front of the heavy iron gate that closed off the driveway and prevented tourists from entering the property and photographing it. But before I could get out of the truck, a black man emerged from the shadows and scraped back the gate for me. He was a heavyset, pie-faced man, with big, half-moon eyebrows and a cranium like an inverted pot. What was his name? Andrew? No, Andre. Andre Bergeron. He ran errands and did chores for the Chalons family and used to sell iced-down oysters off the tailgate of a pickup by the drawbridge near Burke Street.
"Thank you," I said.
"Yes, suh," he replied. "You here to see Mr. Val?"
"How'd you know?" I said.
" 'Cause you a po-liceman in New Iberia. 'Cause you probably working on a crime and you here to see Mr. Val 'cause he's a TV newsman and he got a lot of information on them kind of t'ings."
"You got it pretty well figured out," I said.
"Yes, suh. I do."
I drove into the grounds, through towering oak trees that creaked with the wind. The rain had stopped and the sky was marbled with purple and gold clouds, and through the trees I could see the sunlight winking on the bayou.
Val opened the front door. He was expansive, jocular, a bourbon and crushed ice in his hand, his sister Honoria seated at the piano in the middle of the living room, a solitary lamp burning behind her. The woodwork was dark, the furniture heavy, the air musky-smelling. "How you doing, old buddy?" Val said.
"Hope you'll forgive me for not calling first," I said.
"Oh no, no, no, not a problem. You remember Honoria, don't you?" he said.
Honoria was hard to forget. She was dark-haired and dark-skinned, like her father, with brown eyes and a small red mouth, a mole at one corner. Honoria had received a doctorate from the Sorbonne and had taught music theory for three years at the university in Lafayette. But either her iconoclastic ways or rumors about her libertine behavior caused the university to deny her tenure. Sometimes I would see her in New Iberia's public library, by herself, her glasses perched on the end of her nose, reading until closing time.
"You want a soft drink?" Val asked.
"No, just a word with you," I replied.
Honoria got up from the piano bench and started toward the kitchen. She wore a spaghetti-strap black dress with purple shoes, and the muscles in her back were deeply tanned and looked as hard as iron when she walked.
"I didn't mean for you to leave," I said awkwardly.
"I was going to see if there was any iced tea. I thought you might like that in place of a soft drink," she said. She stared at me, waiting, the sepia-tinted light shining on the tops of her breasts.
"Don't bother," I said.
She walked away, leaving me with the illogical impression that somehow I had been rude.
"What's up?" Val said.
"You told me you didn't know Billy Joe Pitts. He says you fish on his father's lake. Why would you want to jerk me around, Val?"
"Yeah, I know Old Man Pitts. Maybe I didn't put the names together. Square with me, Dave. What are you trying to prove here?"
"I think Pitts tried to click off my switch. Your family owns the parish he works for. A guy like that doesn't take a dump without somebody's permission."
"That's a great line. You could be a screenwriter in a blink. I'm serious. I'd like to help you with that. Isn't your daughter studying literature?"
Valentine was slick. He didn't defend or attack. He treated an insult like a compliment and an adversary like a misguided friend. I had acted foolishly in coming to his house. What had I expected? For a man to agree with me when I called him a liar?
"Thanks for your time. I'll let myself out," I said.
"Don't go away mad. I'm glad you dropped by. Hey, I live in the guesthouse in back. Let's throw a steak on the grill."
"Another time," I said.
He placed his arm across my shoulders. He was almost a half head taller than I, even with a slight slouch in his posture. I tried to step away from him, without being rude, but to no avail. He pointed to an ancient parchment sealed in a glass frame on the wall. "That's our family coat of arms. The parchment is fifteenth century, but the seal goes back a thousand years earlier."